I think we built a billion-dollar project this weekend (by accident)

Recently, I set out to make a simple demo video for one of my side projects.

I thought, “How hard can After Effects be?”
Turns out: very hard.

I spent a whole week on it, and the result was so bad it’s still floating around on Product Hunt if you want a laugh. That week taught me two things:

1. Content creation is a massive time sink for founders.
2. The friction of making good video content for or about your product kills momentum.

The Accidental Breakthrough

When I started working on V2, I asked my friend (an AI engineer) if AI could make this easier.

He told me to give him a little time. Two days later, he came back with a CLI tool that generated motion video from simple inputs.

I tried it. My jaw hit the floor.

It wasn’t Hollywood-level, but it was better than what took me a week in After Effects. Without thinking twice, I hacked together a simple front-end, hooked up the CLI backend, and just like that, it was generating motion videos from single prompts.

Sample output: Watch the video

Why I Think This Could Be Huge

After Effects is the industry standard for motion design, but it’s incredibly hard to learn and time-consuming to use.

What we stumbled into feels like it could completely replace After Effects for 80% of use cases.

If that’s true… It might really be a billion-dollar idea. I am planning to leave my side project, already generating thousands of dollars, to work on this.

What do you think?

Where We Go From Here

Now we’re asking ourselves: should we make this open-source so the community can build on top of it? Or should we double down on turning it into a polished product?

Do we bootstrap? Do we try to find investors?

Maybe you could help us with some of these questions.

Lessons for Indie Hackers

• Solve your own pain first. GoMotion only exists because I was frustrated enough to ask for help.
• Don’t overcomplicate. The first working version was and still is literally a CLI and a barebones UI. That was enough to validate demand.

Takeaway: Sometimes the project you think will take you a week will flop.
And sometimes the one you stumble into by accident could be the next billion-dollar product (I hope).

💡 Side note: The product is GoMotion.io, if you’re curious, you can try it yourself.